I am not sure if I have ever seen a coach pull his best 3 point shooter with 19 seconds left in a 2 point ballgame in real life, yet I see it here regularly.
The first part is probably true. The main reason for this is that real-life coaches base their decisions on highly subjective and imperfect information. They just "know" who is the "best" 3-point shooter on their team. This works pretty well in a team where the players are of very different level. If the players are close enough, the decisions become increasingly arbitrary. The in-game coaches actually have fairly good information about the status of their players. Of course, we don't know how the BBs have implemented this. Regardless, it should be safe to assume that the in-game coaches have at least as good as and much more objective information than their real-life colleagues. They don't play the star because he is a known star who practices hard, a local legend, and an overall nice chap; they play him because they look at the skill set and compare it against the bench player's skill set. For this reason, the coaches are able to make decisions that may appear stupid and counterintuitive but may in fact be the most sensible thing to do.
Having said that, I agree this is perhaps not how it should really happen. We as managers are almost as bad as real-life coaches. We have pretty good understanding about the skills of our players (we have excellent understanding if the players differ more than in sublevels in any particular skill). However, we don't see how tired our players get during the games etc. So, we look at thing like the end-game substitution patterns based on our real-life experience.
I don't really have a point here and I basically agree with you. I guess I'm just trying to say that the situation is probably not as bad as it may look in terms of game mechanics, but there is definitely room for improvement regarding the user experience side. We should see more of stuff that makes sense in real life in my opinion.
Another thing is the overtime, which you also mentioned. I have for some time suspected that there is a bug of some sort or the game engine tires the players too much in the final minutes of the game (which may be demanding, but are also usually full of stoppages to shoot free throws). I don't really have any proof, the overtimes just often look unbalanced to the regulation. It may be the same issue I'm describing in the first paragraph. Perhaps it just hits harder in the overtime as the players have played so much more. And perhaps majority of players have too low stamina levels.
Last edited by GM-WallyOop at 7/3/2010 8:08:09 AM